Chapter 15 – Page 23 and G-Day 2012!

That’s right, Guildies, it’s everyone’s favorite holiday: G-Day! Our annual content patch for the site and all things GA to enhance the experience for you: The Guilded Age reader! We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, frankly, so let’s just get right into it…

Free things first: of course that G-Day graphic is available as a brand new wallpaper. Enjoy!

New Journo-in-Residence, David Wurzel – David is a friend of mine from way, way back in the day, back in a place called “High School.” It was a magickal, mystical place where they let you get away with murder because you technically weren’t an adult yet. I remember Dave as he was kind of vaguely… full of piss & vinegar at the ripe young age of 16, ready to tear the gaming industry a new one because the stupid fuckers didn’t know their shit (his words, not mine). We parted ways, like ya do, and later reconnected via Facebook and were delighted to discover that neither of us wound up a complete asshole. Now I’ve always thought about how much I don’t blog here on the site about stuff we like, because I quit blogging a while ago and have not a lot of interest getting back into it. So I remembered that Dave was an aspiring gaming journo, and our sensibilities are on the same enough wavelength that I can let him speak for me with confidence. So everyone give a big welcome to our new old friend Dave, he’ll be introducing himself today at precisely 12:07PM eastern.

T Campbell adds: As is widely known, I’m not as much of a gamer as Phil is. But when he brought me Dave’s samples, I immediately responded to the fire in ‘em. If you’re well into gaming, or if, like me, you’re really curious about it as an art form, you’re going to enjoy this.

The Guilded Age Wiki – That’s right. We’re doing this. It’s time for a Goddamned wiki. You can upload images, and even suggest your own ideas that we’ll accept as canon if we like them enough! Arkerra’s a vast world, and T and I sometimes have trouble building it all by ourselves. This is your open invitation to join us.

New Reader’s Guide – Are you new to GA and want to get caught up on the plot without digging through the archive? Well, we have a page for that now. Our New Reader’s Guide will catch up anyone new the GA, and even serve as a refresher for those that have been around since day one.

Entitlement on Guilded Age Plus – If you got a copy of Guilded Age Volume 1, then you got to read the bonus story Erica drew for Byron called Entitlement. Well, we were hankering for a new bonus comic to put on GA Plus and yet another thing to annotate, so here we are! It’ll start posting, but you can subscribe now to Guilded Age Plus to read that, two other bonus stories, over 45 pieces of concept art, and hundreds of annotated archives with pencils, inks and unlettered viewing!

New Site Features – There’s a lot of site features that we, frankly, were straight up slacking on or never did correctly. So we’ve enabled the ability to browse by chapter by clicking on the link in the post, or through the archive page. Also, up top in the menubar, we’ve added a lot of nifty things for your fun and convenience. All of the guest strips that you awesome people have given us over time have been gathered in one easy-to-find place, as have our non-comic extra bits like the Swimsuit Editions. Further, we’ve added tagging by character on every page, making it easier to find your favorite pages. There’s a new DLC section that keeps track of GA Multimedia things like theme songs and the flash comic. And there’s also a support page that’ll tell you more philanthropic readers exactly how you can help this boat stay floatin’.

Updated Store – Last but not least, we’re finally making our new merchandise items available for online purchase in our new revamped store, courtest of storenvy.com. Biscuiteer Alumnus Sam referred me to it vis-a-vis her own shop, Queen Tangerine, featuring a growing collection of collectible adorables.

Q & A Day – As is tradition on every anniversary and G-Day, we’re opening ourselves up for goold old fashioned pub house style Q&A! Ask us anything, right down there in the comments. We’ll be popping back all day to field answers as we can!

Phew! That’s a whole lotta stuff. All for you, the best guildies anyone could ask for. Thanks for reading, enjoy all the new site features, and tell your friends about us. We’ve got a great comic and a great crowd going with you guys, and all we need now is the hype. So stick around, we’ve got a whole lot more show for you. Happy G-Day, everyone! See you next March 23rd!

Either that or the party will do something that fundamentally changes the gameworld like they did with the resurrections. I mean, D does suck pretty hard at killing them or controlling them in any real way.

Well, he is working hard to disregard “the fifth” now, so that gets my vote for a blind spot.

H.R. doesn’t seem to have made much progress in debugging this. When the real fifth didn’t disengage (or die), discovering why should have been his highest priority (since it is a good indication that his current solution isn’t one). Instead he waves it off and proceeds with the old plan. That is a perfectly realistic approach (after all, good debugging skillz wouldn’t be such a big deal if everyone had them) but it basically comes down to “hoping for the best” when making even more adjustments to something he doesn’t understand, which has been steadily not doing what he expected it to do.

And, yeah, I have a feeling that “hoping for the best” approach will indeed get him the Best when he least wants it. :3 And, hey, it looks like he could use a fifth about now.

I hate when the GM does that, but it is even worse when the GM does it accidently. Our “Dark Heresy” GM did it last session were he had just flipped through the book, read the flavor text on a monster and said “Oh man, this sounds awesome! I gotta use this!” without even reading the damned things stats!

It turned out it was THE most powerful death machine in the entire game! None of us even had anything that could hurt the damned thing and we were all wounded from the last battle!

Then again, the chase that followed was pretty awesome. :) Kind of like an grim dark version of Benny Hill! ;)

I bet H.R. never bothered to try giving them an achievable win condition and he just figured “Oh well I’ll just kill them, that should work just fine, yep, that’s how all good adventures run by a benevolent DM should end.”

Seriously, inappropriate encounter levels end more games than anything else. Including DM ragequits.

and that’s up and down, in terms of inappropriate. We had a dm that gave us, a group that takes a degree of pride in our munchkinness, a series of shitty encounters that got us barely any xp and didn’t result in us getting scratched. the campaign quickly ended.

OMG – Have you SEEN the GA: Cataclysm patch notes? I have a friend who has a friend on the beta server, and they said that, like, everything is above the level cap now. Like 10 levels higher then we can actually get to. Everything! Even all the little respawning minions! And the exp sucks! And there’s no new gear! and there’s only one new quest line, but it’s totally unwinnable!

Well, see, I’d be just fine with him staying dead, but… He’s still in the tube. Surely if he was dead, they’d have pulled him out. And if he was out of the game but alive, they’d have pulled him out. Thus, something isn’t right there.

This is all speculation of course, but since Phil told us they are players… we don’t necessarily assume that they aren’t aware of the other group.

In fact, that explains a good deal. Remember, the undertaking itself was advertised, the characters interviewed. It’s public knowledge there are supposed to be folks immersed in the game, just not public knowledge that they can’t get out. So the reaction is probably just “man, these guys are good!” Bandit probably appreciates how they didn’t even break character explaining for why the group is alive.

Dunno about the next guest week. We try to do that sparingly, only in times of need. It’s fun for everyone, but people come here to see the main story and we feed it to you intravenously enough as it is! But you can send in a guest comic anytime and we’ll save it for the next run.

As for the second and third question, all I can confirm for you is that “Bandit and the B-Team” are, in fact, players.

Oh, I’m certainly not hoping a guest week will happen soon, or anytime at all really. I know there’s a good chance there’ll be another, just because life happens and such, so I figured I’d ask in case you had an idea of when it’d be. Good to know there’s a queue I can just submit to ahead of time, though!

Actually, all my questions were ‘just in case you can give an answer’. Didn’t really expect anything. :)

Andreas has it right for the most part. H.R. has nothing personal against the heroes, except to the degree that they’re an obstacle. Unfortunately, he’s not exactly concerned about their welfare, either.

Would he have to rescue the players eventually? Granted, they might not be missed immediately, but wouldn’t missing person reports eventually be filed and wouldn’t the police eventually connect them to Hurricane Software? Granted, he might not be all that altruistic, but he would have a self-interested reason for rescuing them wouldn’t he? Are you saying that HR never intended for these people to be returned to society?

I remember the interviews and those were nameless and faceless, so no evidence points towards the company. The missing persons won’t be sought for at HR’s. I believe the main reason for this was that Daedalus didn’t know whether the group will survive or not entering the game world. Safety measures.

yes, yes it does sound familiar. we’re finnaly starting to loop back around.

Though, to be fair to D, most of my DM plans invovle the buirning death of the PCs – that’s why they actually need to do something to stop it rather than happily chugging across on my rails. Thus, I support this motion of unleashing fire gods of doom!

*is surprised that nobody’s G-dayed it up yet and asked a question.* *Ahem*
In short – do our comments matter? Now, I can understand how if we pointed out a typo, or an inadvertent cultural insensitivity, aka a cultural typo (for example, ‘that banana frigg’s eating looks like the state of california, I don’t think your readers from california are going to like that, you better make it look like maine or something’), then “listening to the comments” would be a no-brainer. But how about comments that try to explain a character’s psyche, or guess what’s going to happen next? Have you ever consciously changed something (non-typoish) in Guilded Age, because of something a/some commenter(s) said? If not, could you see that sort of thing possibly happening in the future, provided the comment was a good enough one?

The comments absolutely matter. We enjoy seeing y’all’s analyses of the characters and story in action. It tells us how well we’re getting our shit across, which is important because we’re often deliberately obtuse.

We enjoy the predictions, too. We have never, and never will, change something in the story because a reader was able to correctly predict it beforehand. Sometimes we’ll nudge parts of the story in certain directions if we think you guy will get a kick out of it, but if a reader manages to accurately guess the future, well… we consider that act is own reward. That’s part of why we confirm or deny nothing when asked about the mysterious things: Letting everyone guess iss part of the fun.

There’s probably been a handful of occasions where a comment mentioned something they really wanted to see happen like “Character X vs Character Y” and we take that and manage to stick it in, often without thinking about it. So yeah, I guess on a rare occasion we end up taking “requests.”

But I read all the comments all the time. Not just because I have to moderate, but also because I’m always genuinely interested in what you all have to say. Telling stories is the most important thing in the world to me, and I can’t do that without an audience. And I’ll say we’ve got a damned good one!

Comments always matter. I will say that I weigh the comments a bit more at a distance on Guilded Age than I’ve done on some other strips, partly because Phil likes occupying this particular space so much that I tend to leave him to it, and partly because Guilded Age is the most organized project I’ve ever done. We started this with a very clear outline, which we’ve revised but never abandoned.

Best example: if we didn’t have very clear plans for him, we might have tossed H.R. aside when the initial reactions to his appearance were some of our harshest. And we did tweak him a bit in response to that. But we know how he’s going to pay off.

Psh, speak for yourself, T. HR is integral to this story, I’d never have cast him off. His segments are definitely where GA ventures into experimental territory, so what we do with him is often in flux. Suffice to say we try as hard as we can to maintain his purpose while making him as entertaining to see in action as we can.

Also, I don’t know where you got the impression that I’d rather not have you here in the comment trenches with me, bud.

That is good to hear from the authors; I always wonder a little about how authors regard comments on their work (well, authors who are well past the phase of “omgz I have liek 50 subscribers already!111”). And a little behind-the-scenes and the-making-of infoes are always interesting. Oh, and it’s good to see someone other than Phil in the comment section. And it is weird to see Phil with a new avatar. I liked the huge beardstache…

Anyhow, I iz lurving the new cast page, for one thing, so I am also happily celebrating G-Day.

The brand identity of the art of GA is something that is now in the final throes of transitioning from Erica to John, and our user pics/the cast page was one of those things that took longer to transition than others.

Fun fact: As of now, John has just passed Erica in total strips drawn for GA. Way to go, you beautiful art-man!

A true milestone indeed. Thank you, Phil, thank you all. Erica is a hard act to follow, and sets a high bar to reach. Her work on GA has been a constant inspiration to me. I hope I’ve made, and will continue to make, GA as fun and good-looking as she did.

Syr’nj makes several comments that might imply that wood elf anatomy is fundamentally different from that of humans. Just how different is it? Can they really absorb water with their toes, for instance? Can a wood elf perform photosynthesis?

Akshully, humans can photosynthesize to an extent. Human skin uses sunlight to produce Vitamin D! Naturally, the wood elves should be capable of photosynthesizing even more than that.
(&lt/SMARTASS&gt)

I’m thinkin’ Best tears through from the Nether Realms, hammering out ‘Back In Black’ and clobbers ol’ Techno-whatzitz before he can kill our heroes. Then traffic to the site will drop dramatically after thousands of Best haters claw out their eyes and /nerdragequit. :D

urrrggghhh… Triple-post… Sorry!
But speaking of gorgeous illustration, I love the Tolkien-esque panel for “The Pilfering of Graiya’s Bough.” Also, very easily converted into a playbill. (Can you imagine? “Guilded Age: the Musical?” …by someone awesome, of course. Not that Andrew-Lloyd fellow or his like.)
Ohhhh…. Never mind.

How can you say that the punnery doesn’t translate well? “Getafix”, “Cacophonix”, and all the others translate so well. And some bits look like they must have been re-written purely for the English version – eg. the discussion of the Roman need to refer to their gods by alpha-numeric codes because they have too many, so that the Goddess of secrecy and spying is referred to as MI6. The puns work just fine.

Wellll… The names work very nicely (“Dogmatix”), but in terms of general storyline…? I’ve read pretty much all of them in both french and english. I found the english translation rather weak in >comparisonEnglish<). "Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, knowwhudImean? KnowwhudImean?"

With such comics as "The Adventures of Tintin," the english translation works just as well as the original french, as the humour is physical and therefore as universal as the mystery-hunter storyline.

I dunno… I'm glad you got more out of the eng. versions of "Asterix" than I did. I think I'll go re-read them in both languages and see if I can change my mind positively…

“…in comparison to the original french as puns tend to rely heavily on cultural reference (as in your own example of the ‘MI6’ joke, which although pretty funny and awesome, goes right over the heads of most North Americans because while in english, is very *English.*)…”

soooo…. the above is what got lost between “comparison” and “English.” i hope it’s clearer now.

Hm..So his plan is to summon a ancient god to fight the heros..My question: Has this guy NEVER read a fantasy story before? Summoning up a major god either means the heros are gonna kick its ass by being crazy awesome, or its going to beat them, but not kill them, giving them a chance to power up and kick its ass.
Either way, I cant wait to see what the creators do with this set up :D:D

My thoughts… the players did affect the real world by defying their deaths as it was decreed by the rules of the game. Thus, the magically enhanced mmorpg can somehow affect the real world. What IF… a being of great power, Tectonicus… will find a way to get the hell out of there?
What do you guys think about this?

Seems to me, that with Kickstarter having everyone’s backs, this time would be ideal for building a big project and using the funding goals as an excuse to create all sorts of auxiliary tchotchkes and trinkets.

“Oh, we’ve passed the original goal? Then for another $X,000, we’ll include a Scipio plushy! And for another $Y,000 we’ll create action figures of Frigg! And for a donation of $Z,000, we’ll commission a working replica of Best’s Axe. And then, the board game! And then the collectible card game! And then, posable 3D models! And then . . . ”

Even the attempt would give you a hint about how big the size of the market for such things are, and if the response is bigger than you expected, it’s not a problem, as you include the cost of creation (and design and handling and shipping) in the benchmark.

But that’s the beauty of going the Kickstarter route. The only investment is a little time and a few pre-production design drawings (easier than producing a whole poster) and then throwing the idea out there to see if your fans are willing to pre-fund whatever flight of fantasy you come up with.

The Order of the Stick, Erfworld, and Diesel Sweeties Kickstarters may not be typical for the average comic-makers out there, but you are not the average comic-makers. You have a developed fan base with a reasonable amount of history. That is a valuable asset, and a Kickstarter allows you to leverage that asset without risk.

I’m sure there stuff your fans want that’s a bit more interactive than posters and postcards. Action figures! Motion comics! Replica gear! The only thing you have to do is draw a couple of mock-ups and ask the question “Do you want to give us the money to make this?” And the worst thing that will happen is that no one will say yes, and the product never gets made, and you have a couple of pictures you can add to the GA Gallery.

From one god to another… :P
In short, I think kickstarter is a bit more involved than you’re suggesting. While it’s running (usually for at least 3 weeks), it’s nice if you moderate people’s comments, maybe respond to choice ones…not to mention reply to (or at the very least, read) the comments people send you through kickstarter. That’s not a whole lot, but it’s a bit of work. Every kickstarter I’ve seen so far (except for the really dead ones) has made project updates, so crafting those is a bit of a labor aswell…
Then Phil/T/Other Important Person? need to decide what it is they’d like to create. I mean, if the kickstarter succeeds, they’re very much bound to create this thing. And if they get way more money than they anticipated, they’ll probably be expected to make even more stuff. To use an extreme example, look at OOTS: Rich originally planned to reprint a couple books (maybe reprint all of his books if he got lucky), and as it’s turned out, he’s got a whole year of work cut out for him. Now, our fine Guilded Age creators may be OK with that possibility…but maybe not so much.
To end with a kind of weird point: I would expect there to be some kind of “kickstarter fatigue”. If Guilded Age does a trial kickstarter now, then will people not be as excited to check out the next one? There seems to be an unspoken rule that once you’ve done a kickstarter, you can’t do another one for at least 6 months, likely a year.
That said, If the creators of Guilded Age are OK with all these factors (which could be worse, and could be not as bad), then maybe a Guilded Age kickstarter would be a wonderful thing for them.

Wasn’t Tectonicus the name of the god some gnoll was trying to summon in one of the flashforward bits of an early chapter? From memory, Syr’nj glues dynamite onto Gravedust’s arrow, which is then shot at the summoning orb. It sticks to the summoning orb, knocking it into the lava. Big explosion, it appears the summons is stopped (though this is ambiguous), and the heroes flee from the tide of magically boosted lava. It even had a gnoll-like hyena-thing. Any bets this is the beginning of what was just described?

It was also the religion of that troll shaman Bandit ganked in Chapter Squid.

Unfortunately, we have evidence that we aren’t wrapping back around to Chapter 1 here, a good find by angry-buddha-88, above. Which makes sense, from a writing perspective. Why make what’s an opportunity for such a great battle scene into a foregone conclusion?

(See end of this for tl;dr)
centuriancode, I doubt it. As I just realized ^_^;, the purpose of those comics was to chronologically place all of those mission vignettes we saw (the water supply terrorists, the intro’s gnome-volcano bit, and the flooding prison aka “frigg can absorb water through her toes”). In http://guildedage.net/webcomic/chapter-7/chapter-7-page-2/ , It looks like Day 14 is the day after they saved Frigg (the end of Chapter 6). Next page: It looks like the gnome-volcano bit happened 3 days later. 4 days later: the water supply incident. On page http://guildedage.net/webcomic/chapter-7/chapter-7-page-6/, mission-control-guy mentions the all 3 vignettes /including/ the flooding prison.
In short, all the vignettes chronologically happened between chapters 6 and 7.
…unless the creators are throwing us for a really unusual and unpopular (aka, unlikely) loop. But hey, who’da guessed the main characters were suspended in tubes that used arcane/computer technology?
…..even with that said, I would just assume that all the vignettes happened between Chapters 6 and 7. Anything else makes my head hurt*.
*: Ok, technically it makes it feel like I’m trying to grasp the incomprehensible and illogical, which is a bit distracting and overwhelming. But you don’t need to know that. :P

tl;dr: Chapter 1’s gnome-volcano dealie chronologically happened between chapter’s 6 and 7. As did all the other vignettes.

As someone that actually got a Gold Star once, I’d say that would be somewhat awesome, but not really cost effective to produce if they’re limited to only those that actually have Gold Stars.
Besides, shouldn’t the Gold Star be reward enough?

Eh, relax guys … I’ll just knock over a kindergarten teacher someplace and yank her supply of gold stars, mail them to Phil. That way, when you get a Gold Star, just send him a SASE and he can mail it back to you. You might even get some of his DNA on the gold star! Now that’s something you can brag about to the grandkids!

Web dev request:
Is there a way on your end to make it so comment text that’s been modified with the “a href” tag stands out better? It currently highlights if you scroll over it, but that only helps people spot the link if they already know it’s there.

Happy G-Day!
I also haven’t any questions. I love seeing how the story unfolds and the expressiveness of the art (how d’you DO it, man? Have you no bed? Or do you continue drawing whilst sleeping at the board? [areyouchainedtoitandindesperateneedofrescue?]).

Also, I love reading everyone’s comments and plot-guesses. It’s great fun to be an immediate part of each new comics-post, and also of this little community of appreciative minds. I love how even when folks disagree, there is respect. Yes, I understand there is mediation involved, but this seems to be a particularly cohesive and friendly group. It would not surprise me in the least that if one were to find oneself at a G.A.-only convention, everyone would greet the other as an old friend.

I know I’m late on the Q&A Day, but I just noticed something in the strip.
Is “Nj” essentially Syr’nj’s last name?
I just saw that the plan was to send them back to her home, which is currently ruled by Naror’nj.

Guilded Age does not claim ownership of any of the corporate branding that appears in this comic, nor does it claim any affiliation, partnership, or endorsement of any kind. They are used strictly as an artistic choice for the set dressing of the comic.